Lycoris Aurea
by Penrose Quinn
Summary: "We are the same. You and I." [Trick Pair. A companion piece to Lycoris Radiata.]
1. mononoke

Trick Pair. Blue-eyed Fem!Kurapika. Edo Japan AU. Heavy symbolism (you've been warned). Four-part drabble series. Corresponds to events that took place in **Lycoris Radiata**.

 **Warning:** _Mature and dark themes. Violence. Sexual implications; semi-explicit._

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i.

Like an abrupt dream, his eyes are an incursion.

The pale man is relentless with his sharp-angled glances; how the gold in his glare gleams of vice and voracity, twinkling like smelt steel that can slash throats in mere intervals. _It cuts_ , she thinks. It cuts deep through the hollow of her soul when they gouge for her being with the insatiable hunger of a beast.

However his face is not like that of a spider—bone-white, though not quite like the moon or the string of phantoms that bays for his blood from the soles of his feet. It is painted and unnatural, like rest of his existence. He smirks a little, a sly upturn of telltale lips, and from that very image, she sees the cruel smile of a _mononoke_.

In the peak of eventide, the skies bleed like his tousled hair, the coppery shine of each strand reminding her of the Great Fire. It is alive as it devours the earth whole in its manic blaze and brilliance. Power—power is a fickle thing and it becomes him. _This_ she understands.

Whilst Kurapika is still, he is in constant motion as he comes for her in angular grace and threat. In her quiet observation, she mulls over the manner of his stride. The gait of a man or a wolf? Perhaps, in his shadow there is truth, when it hulks over her form in a calm calculating prowl. He is intimidatingly tall before her, and in an act of mockery, he hunches down to meet her gaze.

She breathes in, catching the scent of fresh blood. "You are a lie."

Head tilting curiously, he croons, "So are you."

"You are not a Spider."

He gently strokes up an inch-long nail on her throat, the delicate contact raising the hairs behind her neck. It is a tease from the kiss of razors. "Ah, lovely creature," he purrs, voice like a caress, "don't you think we rhyme?"

With just as much nerve as he, Kurapika slaps his hand away. "Stop speaking in riddles."

He smiles. It vaguely reminds her of a cracked mirror; a distorted image of fractured sincerity and illusion. However in the fissures sustain a subtleness—a deviousness of an ancient being that thrills in its dark delight.

"I don't," he tells her, "and you know it's true."

He takes a step back, reveling on the flare in her eyes.

"I am a traitor and so are you."

The pale man chuckles. "It rhymes."

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 **Exposition Corner:**

 **Mononoke:** they are vengeful spirits, dead spirits, live spirits, or spirits in Japanese classical literature and folk religion that were said to do things like possess individuals and make them suffer, cause disease, or even cause death.

 **The Great Fire:** The Great fire of Meireki, or also known as the Furisode Fire, is renowned for destroying most of the Japanese capital city of Edo in the third year of the Meireki Imperial era. A reference to the events that took place in Yoshiwara in LR.

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 **A/N:** I wrote this here because I already wrote some scrapped scenes between Hisoka and Kurapika in Lycoris Radiata that just felt so out of place.

 **Disclaimer:** I do not own Hunter x Hunter


	2. yuujo

ii.

"We are the same. You and I," Hisoka says behind her, greeting her with his reflection upon the bronze mirror. "We both want him," he continues on with his hand reaching for her pale neck, "what he is, what he can do to _you_ ," then his fingers brush at the purple-red mark on her nape, and she shivers—in disgust? Not quite. He smells her guilt.

His eyes meet hers, in gold and rust. "However he wants you," he almost laughs at the irony. "The woman that wants him dead."

"Tell me, lovely, how do you do it? Is it sex? He hardly takes anyone to his bed," he chuckles, his pointed nail delicately tracing the curve of her eye. "Or is it those red eyes? Pretty rare things, how he loves them."

"If I were to gouge out these eyes and replace them for my own," he tells her, "will I have his attention?"

"I tire of your games, Hisoka," she warns him.

"He's _my_ prey, lovely," Hisoka breathes out, shuddering. _However you are, too._

Her eyes blaze, and from that glare, his blood lusts for violence—all in a pleasurable rush that thrums from the nerve-endings of his twitching sharp nails to his loins, overwhelmed by oppressive heat, to take this miserable flower, peel and pull and pluck apart. _I want to ravage you_ , he growls within the confines of an unhinged creature. But. It isn't quite the right time yet, so he begrudgingly behaves.

"I'm curious," his fingers slide to the silk of her _hiyoku_ , edging for the skin beneath her collar. "May I have a taste?"

She stares at him fervently, full of fire and fury. "Hisoka," and then she unravels her thin shift and sells herself, as all whores do. However she _isn't_ just a whore, especially when she holds herself before the fall— _a worthy prey_. "Our compromise . . ." she gasps out from the hand roughly groping her breast, an instance of pain, just before he slowly licks the shell of her ear.

"Cut the Spider's head from its shoulders," he repeats her words, which amusingly makes her drip with arousal. "The rest will be its undoing."

Tongue peering, his lips urge him to break her soft supple skin; his knife-like teeth craving to brand a bruise of her promise to him upon her artery that can gush forth in glorious crimson with but a kiss. Her pulse is delicious, the manner it _trembles_ beneath muscle and fat, and resonates in a quiet rhythm of _dead dead dead_. He wants a lick. If only her blood could have tasted sweeter.

"And it seems," Hisoka whispers to her neck though he has already sunken his fangs deep onto her flesh, onto her bitter, bitter soul: "tonight, I shall be your undoing, little one."

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 **Exposition Corner:**

 **Yuujo:** a regular Yoshiwara prostitute, which means "play woman."

 **Hiyoku:** silk kimono robes that are worn under kimono.


	3. shunga

iii.

Underneath the bleeding moon, he takes her in rough intercourse.

Kurapika doesn't mind. Pain is a familiar companion.

It is when he takes her in feral brutality that she realizes that they are no different from vicious beasts in heat. The ground trembles, the earth splits between her fingers where all the sin and grime sticks onto her nails. Absentmindedly, the wild grass they lay turn into the silken sheets from a brothel, the stench of sweet incense coalesced over sex and sweat. A thin grim smile crooks the side of her lips. _Not much has changed after all._

This is a debauchery. The very sight and scent and sensation of it is, whenever he pushes inside her like a great tide, a savage energy that threatens to break and break and _break_ her into pieces, but she knows she is already a broken thing, holding onto the vestiges of revenge. Bent and broken and burnt, but grasping onto the edges still. _That—_ that is what this violent creature wants. What he salivates on, feeds on, hungers on.

So he ravages her from behind; a clawed hand grabbing her rear, a wide red smile on the nape of her neck. His fingers are careful, though—as to not scratch her soft flesh because she is spoken for, but he doesn't mind her scratching him till he bleeds, till blood and sweat streak from his thigh. He relishes this all the more when she fights back.

However this night, it feels too gratuitous than tortuous, as his hand slowly glides down from her abdomen, sharps nails teasing to cut, and stops at the thatch of coiled hair, trenching over nether lips, fingers sliding in and—

The treacherous moan echoes from her throat. There is a dull ache from her clenched teeth and her shaking legs that attempt to kick him in retaliation. He goes on and on, reveling on that slick warmth, and the pleasure it gives her repulses her to the bone. "Faster," Kurapika rasps out shuddering breaths. "Don't be gentle," this doesn't make him cease, and in her shame, she whimpers, "please."

"It isn't like you to plead," he tells her from her fallen disheveled hair. His tone is that of mild surprise.

"It isn't like you to care," she spats out.

In the end, he abides. She doesn't scream, but there is blood painted on the flowers beneath them.

 _Pain_ , she thinks, lips quivering. It is all she will rather know.

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 **Exposition Corner:**

 **Shunga:** translated as "spring pictures", it is an erotic artistic tradition that emerged from early modern Japan, featuring graphic images of sexual activity. At its best, _shunga_ celebrates the pleasures of lovemaking, in beautiful pictures that present mutual attraction and sexual desire as natural and unaffected.


	4. ōtekkō

iv.

Dark entrails of the Spider are slick and stuck under his fingernails.

Hisoka grins at his palm. Is this what a legend is reduced to?

That woman tells him they shall meet from the river, where awaits him is a promise made of gold. Something bristles beneath his skin, an untamable malice, that pounds hotly from his veins at the thought of ruined mortals. He could almost taste it, the blood on their lips.

He treads and treads until the evening fires make the skies burn, and the sun is choked down, split in half by the teeth of mountains. The wind is howling and humid, but it is not the one that makes him swelter in a rush of excitement. His strides grow larger and his foot steps unknowingly on a flower. A manic smile stretches wide on his mouth. How must he have her when he kills her, finally?

There lay the promised river as crimson as Sanzu.

There they rest afloat, pale and weightless as their souls.

There he meets betrayal when gold turns into sand.

They are dead.

They are _dead_. Bloated flesh on water, breathless bloodless bodies. Uselessly lifeless.

The rage in him nearly rips his paper skin apart and the red lilies quaver back to their thatches. He bays for her blood on his fingers, her carnage wedged between his teeth. Her throat slit clean, her bones broken, her eyes blood-red, and her final battle cry swallowed down by his parting kiss. This dying flower was his claim, only his; death be damned.

Hisoka wants to crush something from the palm of his hand, raze the earth into pieces, and before he could unleash a furious scream, he stops and thinks and finds himself giving in to a breathy rapturous guffaw. His laughter echoes to the heavens; it is the sound of madness, the song of tearing hysteria that should make even the gods tremble. He is still hungry and the slaughter of bandits is not quite enough to satisfy him.

So he shall wait.

A lifetime is but a heartbeat, a daydream, to him anyway—and while he revels in the blood he has spilt in leisure, he shall wait for her with all the compensation of violence and violation. Even if he has to drag her back from the very hideous depths of Mugen Jigoku itself.

After all, she has promised him that he shall paint her red.

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 **Exposition Corner:**

 **Mugen Jigoku:** translated as "The hell of uninterrupted suffering", it is the eighth and deepest circle of hell, reserved for the worst of the worst. Some say that those who are sent here never come back, while others say that the term of punishment here lasts one full _antarakalpa_ , after which the soul may reincarnate again; although, even after a soul is finally released from this hell, its punishment is said to continue on into its next lives.

 **Sanzu River:** or known as "the River of Three Crossings", it marks the boundary between this world and the world of the dead.

 **Ōtekkō:** iron pyrite, or popularly known as "fool's gold."


End file.
